Day one of Can’t Get Online Week has proved as interesting and challenging as I thought. The first obstacle was the long drive south from Huddersfield to the New Forest, which meant an early start.
A fairly uneventful journey passed surprisingly quickly, meaning that I arrived at the venue, the Bold Forester Pub, in Marchwood, Hampshire, in plenty of time. I’d been promised support with connectivity for the event from satellite provider, Hughes Europe, and I was glad to see Zak, their engineer, arrive about 20 minutes after I did, as I had been starting to panic, without internet or mobile phone connections.
Zak set up his equipment, we got online, and then people started to arrive. In the end, there were about 35 people present, an impressive turnout as the section of the village which really struggles with connectivity only comprises 60 households.
We had a really good, lively, and informed discussion. The residents present came largely from the part of the village immediately adjacent to the pub. Marchwood is divided by a by-pass, and it seems that the main part of the village, on the other side of the road, largely has acceptable connectivity. It is radically different on the side we were in. We talked about how watching the BBC iPlayer is an unfulfilled dream for most of them. We discussed how what little internet connectivity there is disappears completely once the kids come home from school and rush to try to get online. And we talked about the people trying to run businesses who have to travel to places with better connectivity to use online services and send content to clients.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the chat came when we talked about potential solutions to the village’s problems. People were frustrated at lack of action, both on the part of the major connectivity suppliers, and of the public partners who might be involved in solutions. But, they hadn’t, until this point considered there might be an alternative to sitting back and waiting for their existing supplier to take action. Discussion became more animated as they realised there might be alternatives, and when Chris Conder joined the group via Skype to give her real world accounts of connecting her farm and village, it obviously made a deep impression on the group. Members left talking about the possibility of installing share satellite connections as possible short-term solutions, and working on their own wired connections in the longer term.
I found the event incredibly inspiring because it was about more than the internet. Neighbours were meeting each other for the first time, and, within a short interval, were talking about shared interests and taking common action to address them. This event was about community, a community interest in addressing their common lack of connectivity, and an exploration of how that shared interest could help strengthen community ties. It’s a real counter to those people who say that the internet is isolating and anti-social.
Here’s Graham from Marchwood talking about his impressions of the event:
Thank you for a very interesting start to Can’t Get Online Week here in the New Forest.
Marchwood does have problems, for sure, but there are other areas of the Forest where users are only able to check an email account once in every few weeks due to poor or near-non-existent service – looking at web pages? Forget it. I recently emailed an Internet user in a part of the New Forest with good service, who then referred me to her colleague in a more remote area. She added at the end of the email, “don’t be surprised if she doesn’t get back to you straight away. Her service is so bad, she only bothers connecting once a month as it is so time-consuming it can take all day just to get a connection and check email.”
Getting online is only half the problem in the New Forest though. I note that you write that for certain Marchwood residents, watching the BBC iPlayer is but a dream. This is true. The ‘Waterside Parishes’ of the New Forest have variable connectivity and a large population that puts great pressure on what service there is. The problems do not stop there however. While entertainment (and the needs of business, which you also address here) are certainly an issue, the provision of information about local issues by key organisations of governance in the New Forest is also an issue. It’s as though (connectivity aside) the Internet has come late to this part of Hampshire.
One of the major problems affecting the New Forest as a broad and varied community is that, once online, many of its organisations of governance are simply not geared up to meet the expectations of an Internet savvy population. It’s as though the penny has only just dropped with regard to the need to provide reliable content about local issues by organisations such as New Forest District Council, the local Parish councils (some are better than others) and the National Park Authority (which, since its inception, has had an impact on most people’s lives in both big and small ways).
These organisations of governance just don’t seem to understand simple issues concerning the Internet and how best to use it to strengthen the community links that you speak of here. A good example of this is the decision earlier this year by the National Park Authority (the NPA) to reorganise its website and reshuffle the content. Every local business, hotelier, B&B, community organisation or individual user who had web pages linking to specific content on the National Park Authority website, suddenly found that their links were broken because the NPA didn’t understand the basics when it came to maintaining a central mine of information that their site represented.
To give a brief picture of what this actually meant, one New Forest site operator had to rebuild 180+ links to content on the NPA site because everything had moved and users were getting ‘Page not Found’ messages. Crucial information concerning planning issues, issues affecting businesses, community matters, local events, key contact information, and so on, was lost and, as a community, we had to start rebuilding our links to key sources of information to keep people informed (including, ironically, information about how to get online).
At the other end of the scale, New Forest District Council has an abundance of micro-sites that seem to constantly spring up and then disappear or get mothballed once they are met with a near-total lack of interest in their paltry PR offerings. Articles languish on these micro-sites, quickly becoming out of date, and leaving those that CAN get online in the New Forest feeling that there is a skills vacuum from their key local information providers, or a lack of will to provide local content that is relevant and useful.
In the New Forest, the truth is that while getting online can be possible if support, encouragement and technical assistance is available, once you do you find that our central agencies that should have been taking a far more active lead are themselves only just getting to grips with what the Internet can offer its community (and for the most part they are getting it wrong).
John, what was mobile data like in the area across the various networks? Did you get a chance to try?
Not done any scientific tests, but most people are complaining about next to no mobile signals at all. Three seems to have better cover than most, although in Marchwood, people were saying only Vodafone has coverage
@Tim: Can’t offer scientific tests but from a user point of view, 3Mobile is very good throughout the Forest on my Nokia, unless you are in densely wooded areas where it sometimes fails. Vodaphone is good too though best around major north-south and east-west arterial routes. I no longer use Vodaphone however. I also run a Sony E on Orange and that always defaults to the T-Mobile roaming facility that my account has, once away from any village or A Road (and T-Mobile fails once in the remote open forest areas, regardless of tree cover). Orange even fails within 1/2 mile of Lyndhurst village centre which technically is the heart of Forest commerce. The best coverage seems to be 3Mobile in my personal experience. I also use GPS devices for walking and photo-tracking and have experimented with a few: the best coverage is provided using the SatMap10 I’ve found. Garmin’s lighter units start to lose signal in really dense summer tree cover though I’ve heard there’s been some improvement in that. The north of the Forest is more open and easier to get a signal on high ground, but again, Orange is the worst in this respect and I certainly wouldn’t rely on an Orange connection if I required it for safety during riding or a very long walk in remote parts. Hope this helps.